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The former BBC Breakfast host said his prognosis was “not dire but not brilliant by any means” and that although he hates the term “bucket list” he planned to spend the summer doing one or two things he would not otherwise have done.

A keen bee keeper, he was at the Chelsea Flower Show to highlight the importance of the work of the Bees for Development charity and said the hobby had provided a welcome relief distraction since his diagnosis.

Turnbull, 62, said: “I’ve had six rounds of chemotherapy and that should be the lot but I think I will have to have some more.

Turnbull appeared on the Great British Bake Off: Stand To Cancer 2017 special, without realising he had cancer Credit:
Mark Bourdillon / Channel 4

He described the “deep shock” he experienced on learning of his diagnosis and urged men to get checked for the disease.

Since then, he has been contacted by “a lot” of people who had been inspired to get tested as a result, or whose fathers or relatives had gone to get checked, and had been told they had prostate cancer.

“Lives have been changed, lives have been saved as a result, which is fantastic,” he said.

“I didn’t go to the doctor for four years because I didn’t have anything wrong with me, I thought.

“Occasionally I think if I had taken notice of this or that things might be brighter but there we go, you just have to get on with it."

Turnbull, who has three grown-up children, is being treated at the Royal Marsden, a specialist cancer treatment hospital in London, which he said was a “great place.”

“You don’t have to ask anybody what’s wrong,” he said. “We all know."

He has had chemotherapy, hormone injections and a "cocktail of drugs” and believes he should still have “quite a lot of time.”